Steve:

I agree with you in principle. Keep it simple. One of our club members has been flying 35-40% planes with DA-150 and 3W-120's for the last 5 years. As far as I know, he has never had a radio issue or failure.

Just like you mentioned, he uses dual receivers, dual battery packs and switches, keep the rx's away from the ignition pack, twists his wires, and that's about it. The wire runs on his 40% Carden 540 are not quite as long as the Boomerang, but close.

Unfortunately, I am not an electrical engineer. I have been using toroids and ferrite beads for years with my ham radio stuff, and they work wonders for getting rid of RFI from computer monitors, and stray RFI generated by all the peripheral equiptment in my station. That's basically why I have used some of them in my R/C installations, but really have never had a significant RFI problem that I am aware of in my jets or giant scale, just using clean wiring techniques. I have used Andy Low's opto-isolator, but after reading Andre's post, I have a few questions for Andy about his unit.

I agree with you that every additional item is another failure point. I lost my Bandit 2 weeks ago when an old voltage regulator burned up while I was on final. No more of those for me. I took them out of my other planes and noticed no difference in range check---using 10x with 5 cell Rx packs.

Tom